


eyes shut and fingers open

by bog gremlin (tomatocages)



Series: soulmates (in color) [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Half-Galra Keith (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27176933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatocages/pseuds/bog%20gremlin
Summary: Keith never once thinks that Shiro could be his soulmate. He’s wrong.A continuation ofa blue sky glimpse
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: soulmates (in color) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983692
Comments: 33
Kudos: 152





	eyes shut and fingers open

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akaiiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaiiko/gifts), [ragdollrory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ragdollrory/gifts).



> Written for Trope Bingo, prompt B1 : Oh my god they were soulmates
> 
> Requested by [@akaiikowrites](https://twitter.com/akaiikowrites); and [@ragdallrory](https://twitter.com/ragdollrory), posted for Keith's birthday (a little late). 
> 
> This is a continuation of _a blue sky glimpse_ ; it makes more sense in that context.

we lie in each other’s arms  
eyes shut and fingers open  
and all the colors of the world  
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

  
— _[Colors passing through us](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47398/colors-passing-through-us), _ Marge Piercy 

* * *

Keith doesn’t stop seeing in color when Shiro disappears.

“Shiro’s dead, Keith,” Hunk tells him. He’s trying to be kind, but this tone still rasps against Keith’s ears as though it was modulated specifically to hurt him. “He wouldn’t want you to keep throwing yourself out into space looking for him.” 

“I’ll be back after I finish the next quadrant,” Keith responds. His eyes ache with the stress of looking at Hunk head-on; Hunk’s armor always glints and flickers, like Keith’s eyes can’t stop twitching whenever he encounters it. It’s honeycomb, popcorn, the dappled way light worms through mosquito netting. 

Hunk sighs. “Be careful out there, buddy,” he says. Like they’re friends. 

Keith knows that the others talk about him behind his back, about his relentless pursuit and the way he flinches away from the screen whenever they watch a movie as a group. No one’s said anything to his face — that’s not their style, except for Allura, and Keith can sense that she’s working herself up for a confrontation — but it’s clear that the paladins are losing patience with Keith. Keith learned how to recognise the signs of someone losing patience in him a long time ago, and all of the hallmarks are there: eyerolls and huffed sounds of irritation, forgetting to leave a share of rations in the kitchen for him. 

Pidge is the most compassionate. She keeps updating his star charts. Every time he looks at her, Keith tries to ignore her armor and focus on the glints of copper in her hair, the way she flushes red when she’s emotional. 

Keith knows he’s a freak. He’s not sure if his vision is tied to his lion, or if it has something to do with being Galra. He doesn’t think it has anything to do with finding a soulmate, unless the concept of  _ space _ can be considered a soulmate. Shiro’s disappearance knocked Keith’s color perception for a loop, but Keith knows that Shiro is not his soulmate. That would be too simple, too easy. It doesn’t work like that. 

He doesn’t  _ think  _ it works like that; when most everyone undergoes the color-correcting procedure before they’re born, it’s a moot point.

Even though he hasn’t been seeing along the spectrum for long, a sudden loss can’t change the fact that his photoreceptors have developed. It would be more dramatic if that's how things worked — if Keith had run into Black’s cockpit and seen the empty chair, and all the color had bled out of his vision. But that’s not how Keith started seeing in color, and it’s not how he loses it.

He does lose something, or maybe gain it — something more than Shiro, Shiro’s horrible legacy, his only friend,  _ Shiro _ — because after Black chooses him as her pilot, Keith starts noticing little motes in front of his eyes whenever a battle is particularly intense. It’s not a color. It’s like looking out of a smudged window, or a screen that’s fogged over and been drawn on with a fingertip.

A lot of astronauts lose the crisp edge of their vision after they’ve lived in space for a while, because the low-gravity environment encourages every muscle, even the ones around the eyes, to go lazy without Earth pressure. Keith doesn’t think it’s that. But. He’s been wrong before. 

Much like he doesn’t want to pilot Black, Keith also does not want to continue practicing his color-matching exercises. He used to do this with Shiro, squinting to pick out the different hues in the card deck until he developed a headache and Shiro would make him lie down with a cold compress over his eyes. Keith still practices — he has trouble with anything that doesn’t have an undertone of red to it — but now he doesn’t have anyone who thinks to check his work, or who encourages him to rest, or who makes a game out of the matching pieces. Now it’s like piecing together an enormous puzzle and all of the pieces are smooth-sided. He can’t always differentiate between the colors.

Keith’s headaches come on stronger now, and they never quite go away. Shiro used to rub his temples for him after a training session, or else he’d coax Keith into napping against Shiro’s broad shoulder until the pain dulled to something manageable. He’d turn off the overhead light in his quarters and let Keith relax in the dark, and he’d ask questions that felt like a test Shiro wanted Keith to pass. 

_ Soulmate. _ It’s such a stupid word. Keith doesn’t think it's capable of encompassing everything Shiro has been to Keith, everything Shiro still is. 

* * *

Keith prefers being out in space, even when he knows in his gut that the quadrant he’s searching won’t yield his friend. Piloting the lion is restful; it doesn’t require him to articulate what he’s feeling. Keith’s not a stranger to grief, and he knows how to ride it out by assigning himself a task. Probably Allura would prefer if he assigned himself to win the war that they’re fighting, but Keith knows this sadness. He’s lived in it before. He’s familiar with the way it settles heavy in his bones, crowding out things like sleep and a sense of proportion. He has to take his time before he can manage a new equilibrium. 

Things don’t get better when he finally, finally finds Shiro. Keith still sees those little motes in front of his eyes whenever he’s in Black, and there’s a yawning emptiness in every conversation he has with the other paladins. They’ve treated him differently, since Keith found Shiro. It’s almost like they resent him for having kept the faith. 

“You’re too single-minded,” Pidge tells him. It’s a weird thing for Pidge to even say; Pidge is arguably more single-minded than anyone else on the ship. 

It’s one of his off-days, when he’s returned from a Blade mission and hasn’t felt the need to inform the others of his injuries; this time it’s a cracked rib and a strained hip flexor. Usually when this happens he spends time communing with Black, because she’s taken to letting her considerable thoughts echo around in his head. It’s not a maternal feeling, not that Keith would be able to identify that; it’s more like what he has when he’s with the Blades, like being watched over by a brother-in-arms. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he catches a few hours of sleep on the cot in the cargo bay. Black is the only place where Keith doesn’t have nightmares.

“We’re in the middle of a war,” he tells Pidge. To make matters more confusing, Keith’s been getting crap lately for having split his attention between Voltron and the Blades. He’s not sure how that qualifies as being single-minded. 

“You just aren’t looking at the big picture,” Pidge continues, like Keith hasn’t said a word. “You don’t have a plan.”

The thing is — Pidge isn’t wrong, but neither is she right. Keith can’t really help that he’s so tied to his current mission rotation. There’s something soothing about being expected to perform to a higher standard, one that has rules and limits and sharp edges. The Blades are better about boundaries than the Paladins; knowledge or death. It’s the simplest thing Keith’s had to do since he left the Garrison’s innumerable flight drills. He still manages to mess things up, but when it’s on a mission — at least it’s something Keith  _ did. _

Keith doesn’t say any of this out loud, not to Kolivan and not to Shiro. He just goes back to his bunk and lays out his color deck, holding the cards up next to the screen in his quarters. Green gives him trouble. He keeps flipping through the little deck so he can find the cards that remind him of Pidge and her lion. 

“Do Galra see in color?” Keith asks Regris after they’ve finished a mission brief. It’s the first thing Keith has bothered to say to him since he carried Regris to safety; they weren’t chatty before that mission, and Keith doesn’t see that changing. 

Regris stares at him. He’s got his mask down and his nictitating membranes keep flicking over his eyes. It’s dry at the headquarters, and dusty; about half the Blades have inner eyelids like this, and Keith is starting to envy them. He’s still deeply uncertain about his Galra heritage, but it’d be nice if it enabled him to do more than annoy his old crewmates and open doors on enemy ships.

“There’s no color in space,” Regris says, which isn’t an answer. Kolivan isn’t the only one who’s pissed about Keith’s last mission stunt. On top of Keith’s inability to conduct a conversation on a good day, he’s the most alienated alien in the Blades.

It figures: Keith doesn’t fit in here, either, but the boundaries are easier to navigate. 

* * *

Krolia, when he meets her, draws back the veil. 

“There’s not much to see,” she tells him. “I don’t know if all Galra see color, or if the genetic therapy on Earth would have helped you. You look human enough. Maybe this is something you should have asked your father about.”

Keith still hasn’t told her his father is dead. He hasn’t known her for long; they’ve barely managed to build a shelter on the whale and figure out how to stagger their watch shifts. He feels closer to the wolf he found.

“Good point,” is all he says. He stands and takes a stick with him, thinking idly that he might try teaching the wolf how to play fetch (again). The last twelve times haven’t worked, but Keith is nothing if not tenacious; the wolf seems to enjoy it, even if she doesn’t ever give chase. She’s smarter than Keith has ever been. She knows when something isn’t worth the energy.

He does tell Krolia about his father. Eventually. 

It comes out naturally one night, when she’s helping him practice his colors. They still come and go. If Keith doesn’t keep reminding himself what the different intensities mean, the headaches intensify into a migraine that makes him useless in a fight. Half the time, he can only reliably identify the colors that come up on his own skin when he’s nursing a bruise. 

Krolia sets her hand down on top of the card deck. Her purple skin is jarring against the color Keith’s been struggling with for the past sixteen minutes, which means it’s probably orange. 

“How long has he been dead?”

Keith does the math. “Ten years, twelve? Give or take.” Time is different here: Krolia’s set up a complicated schedule of check ins and seasonal markers, but Keith’s not entirely sure how it translates to life back on Earth. And Keith was never the best about measuring time in any linear way. It’s all anchored by events, not dates on a calendar. “I was still a kid.”

She makes no move to comfort him. Keith’s grateful. His father’s death is a sticky kind of grief, one that’s a major part of him. It’s not always painful now; less a ligament and more the muscle beneath it, a foundation that can bear an increasing burden the longer he carries it. 

“I thought I’d know,” Krolia says, half to herself. Then, in a brusque tone: “but why would I have? It’s not like there was a thread binding us.” 

There was. That thread was —  _ is  _ — Keith, but the years and distance and the war have stretched any bond he once had with his mother to a point where it’s just a suggestion. Keith knows that this sort of thread is the hardest to break, and it’s also the hardest to keep hold of. The only way to preserve it is to wrap it so securely about your heart that it strangles a part of you. It’s a loss with no fix. It’s a knowledge that is second only to death. 

* * *

Eventually, enough time passes on the whale that they complete their mission and find another one in need of finishing. Keith returns to the Castleship. A lot has changed: Keith knows he’s gotten taller, and he can lift more weight than he used to. He and the wolf have learned how to fight together, and Keith has started to understand the flashes of potentiality he’s seen on the whale, to interpret how he can and cannot ride out events as they unfold. 

It’s a relief when he faces Shiro on the platform: Keith’s surrounded by the colors he can see. It’s almost like being in his Trial, what with how vulnerable he feels. Keith knows things, now: he knows how to fight, and he’s always been good at losing.

People always assumed Keith was cocky without a reason. Flying is the only thing he was ever good at; it’s something no one could take from him. It didn’t matter how hungry or angry or tired he was, it didn’t matter if he’d gotten into a fight or if he’d forgotten his homework, or if he couldn’t see the colored highlighters the teacher used for a study guide. Everyone acted like it was a surprise that he spent so much time running into barriers and coming right up against the line, but he didn’t have any other options. Keith knows how to move in a confined space, because there isn’t a space smaller than the one he’d been expected to fit into. Keith was doubly crippled, first by his isolation and second by his inability to see the world as society intended it. The gene therapy was widespread enough that most schools didn’t even have to include soulsight in their education plan. Keith couldn’t describe the specific maze he had to run through to get to the end, but at least it gave him the skill he needed to maneuver out of a tight spot once he was in it. 

Fighting Shiro — it’s everything like encountering a new piloting setup and not knowing what the colors are and what they’re supposed to mean. It almost makes sense — it’s Shiro,  _ Shiro,  _ Keith’s heart is overcome at the sight of him like this, after all this time — but it’s disconcerting, enough to knock Keith off his feet. 

“Actually,” Shiro tells him, “neither of us are leaving.” 

Well.

If that’s what it takes, Keith is ready to die on this hill. 

As brutal as the fight is, there’s a certain comfort in it. Shiro once told Keith that he was human in grayscale, restful to the eyes. That’s certainly true now, even as sparking power cables and shattered glass pile up around them. Everything is tinted a heavy purple, the color of bruises. The color of Keith’s mother’s skin, the color of Black’s interior piloting controls. After red, it’s the color Keith is most comfortable seeing — it’s just a brighter grey. Shiro’s always been handsome, and he’s beautiful in the cataclysmic lightshow of the emergency systems, lavender and violet flickering over his face and highlighting his cheekbones, the scar across his nose. Keith doesn’t want to die like this, but it makes sense. He’s had time to get used to the idea; first during his Trials, again on the back of the whale. Shiro will be the death of him. He’s been the turning point for every major event in Keith’s life.

Even with the advance notice, it’s hard to reconcile certain things. Shiro punches Keith in the jaw and doesn’t pull back at the last minute, the way he did whenever they sparred on the castleship. The force knocks Keith’s helmet off. Shiro has a wild grin on his face and it hurts to think about the lack of gentleness in his face now: this is the same man who sat on the floor of his room and helped Keith practice matching colors like a child. The same man who insisted on ending every single one of those sessions by massaging Keith’s temples, trying to combat eye strain. 

Keith’s ready to die with Shiro. Oddly, his head doesn’t ache for the first time in — years. His vision doesn’t flicker once during the fight, even though all the ingredients for an overwhelming color flare are present. 

Holding tight to the hilt of his blade with one hand, feeling the deep strain of Shiro’s unconscious weight pulling Keith’s other arm from its socket: Keith has seen this, even if he didn’t know the true color of it. The visions on the whale were never so crisp. 

Keith falls into the low, flickering gravity of the facility, keeping his gaze fixed on Shiro’s face for as long as he can stand the building light behind him. Shiro’s unconscious. Shiro isn’t dead. Keith can feel his pulse rabbiting in his wrist, and his own heart is scraping itself off his ribs as it tried to catch up. 

Keith does not believe that Shiro is his soulmate. 

He doesn’t believe it even as they fall together and Black interferes with the kindest death Keith could ever hope to have; he doesn’t believe it during the horrible moments when Allura pulls Shiro’s ghost out of Black, or when his vital signs crash while he’s wasting away in that  _ fucking _ pod — not even when he can see the yellow alarms spreading over the green-glass window of the pod, and yellow is one of the hardest colors for Keith to see. 

(When Shiro wakes up: Keith closes his eyes when he hugs him. Maybe this can erase the terrible memory of how Shiro didn’t listen to him, on that platform, and how they fell —. )

Here’s the thing: Keith knows how to be lonely. He does not know how to be loved. He’s out of practice with the give and take of it. Keith knows how to give. He knows how to have things taken from him. If Shiro is his soulmate — Keith hopes his soulmate is the wolf. It would be easier that way, and hasn’t he earned something easy, something good? Maybe that’s why he can’t really manage certain parts of the color spectrum; the wolf can’t see them either, and it never bothers her. Keith could be content with this. 

“It’s funny, seeing you be a coward,” Pidge says when she agrees to take Shiro on as a passenger in Green. “It’s not like you.”

“Pidge,” Krolia says, because Keith is not about to speak in his own defense. She doesn’t say anything else, but Pidge falls silent.

“You are not a coward,” Krolia tells Keith, later. 

“Pidge is right,” Keith says to his mother. “I am, a little. When it comes to this.” 

* * *

Seeing in color gets easier after Shiro’s soul is pulled out of Black and poured back into the world of the living. Not all at once, not in a burst of light and intensity: but bit by brutal bit, Keith starts taking note of what’s around him. He spends less and less time reviewing his color cards. Black’s controls start shifting into a new spectrum entirely. She used to arrange the control panels for Keith so he could navigate according to a series of location-specific charts and screens; now she projects systems up on the screen in a rainbow of layers, granting each overlay a different hue and meaning. 

Keith adjusts. 

“You’re blinking less,” Krolia tells him during one of their rest stops. The asteroid is lush with greenery and blooming flowers that may or may not be trying to proposition Hunk; their tendrils and stems keep reaching out and bedeck him in iridescent blooms. Keith’s not sure if this is a sentient plant version of trying to arrange a marriage, but if it is, he’s not sure the blossoms are of an appropriate age. Pidge and Lance appear to be egging a shrubbery on. 

“Hm?” Keith nudges the wolf with his knee; she rolls to all four feet and sneezes crossly before ‘porting over to Hunk and herding him further into the clearing. 

“Is your vision improving?”

“I don’t know,” Keith says. He really doesn’t. It’s hard to say if the broader spectrum available to him counts as  _ better _ or  _ worse;  _ it’s just one more change in how the world presents itself. 

“Not the color,” Krolia says. She takes Keith’s chin in one hand — her hand is the size of Keith’s face, and he experiences a momentary flash of frustration that both his parents are giants and he’s comparatively small — and pulls his face up close to hers, staring at him for a long moment before pursing her lips and blowing sharply into one of Keith’s eyes. “Ha. Yes. Your third eyelid’s coming in.”

Keith blinks rapidly, pulling out of his mother’s grasp while he thinks that over. There’s a heavy cloud of pollen in the air around him, but unlike the other paladins, he hasn’t been plagued by red eyes or itching. He can’t rightly say if he’s prone to pollen allergies or not, since in his lived experience (in the desert, on a ship in the middle of space) there weren’t enough flowers around to know one way or another. 

When he blinks now, there’s a hesitant drag over his eyeballs. His vision’s still sharp, and the increased color spectrum makes things seem more so, but there’s a faint halo if he focuses on an object for too long. 

“How long have you noticed it?” Krolia sounds pleased. Keith’s seen her memories. She wasn't disappointed Keith didn’t look like her when he was a baby, but he supposes it might be nice to have a family resemblance. 

To be truthful, the third eyelid is probably left over from his fight with Shiro. Keith hasn’t talked about it with the other paladins and his mother only knows what she caught glimpses of on the whale. Shiro hasn’t said anything either, though Keith’s certain he remembers the general sequence of events that led to him losing his arm. Black had a wide view of what was going on at the time, and that’s where Shiro was watching from. 

Keith remembers feeling feral and terrified, and he recalls the way his vision shifted during that fight. His eyelids aren’t the only thing that changed, though he cringes at the memories: his mouth hurt terribly in the aftermath, in a way that had little to do with the hits he’d taken and more to do with the way his teeth had sharpened during the fight, the little bones pushing out from the gumline and cutting into his lips. Even now, weeks later, some of his bruises are taking too long to fade. Keith suspects that they might not fade at all, that he’ll bear the marks Shiro made on him for the rest of his life. It’s not a shock. There was quintessence behind every blow Shiro landed on Keith; maybe the violence shocked something loose in his head, maybe that’s the real reason Keith can see the world as it is. 

He’d rather be without a soulmate entirely, if the alternative is to be made whole by acts of violence. 

After the others have turned in for the night, Keith sits up next to the wolf by the campfire. He likes being outside, even if burning unfamiliar vegetation is asking for a new and thrilling respiratory ailment; it reminds him of life on the whale, and back in the desert. Keith does his best thinking in front of a fire. 

Sometime after the first watch ends — Keith’s too restless to sleep and doesn’t bother to rouse Hunk for the next shift — Shiro clambers awkwardly out of Green’s shadow and joins him. 

Keith’s been running through the deck of color-matching cards, more out of habit than anything else. He’s thinking of taking up drawing if they ever make it back to earth; one of the group home facilitators used to keep a stack of those adult coloring books lying around for when he was stuck on the comms system with a social worker or the state agency. The endless busywork of coloring inside the lines looked like it was a legitimate alternative to pulling his hair out, or biting at his nails until they bled. A book like that would be a good hobby if they make it out of the war: practicing colors and keeping his hands busy, learning how to sit still again. _ Coloring,  _ Keith thinks;  _ I’ve got to remember that. Coloring, or maybe puzzles. _

“Can’t sleep?” He asks after a while.

Shiro shrugs and pastes one of his pretend-smiles across his face, though he’s too obviously tired for it to be convincing. Keith used to watch Shiro practice his confident smiles in the mirror when he was applying for the Kerberos mission; he’s familiar with the nuances that go into the expression. “Don’t always know when I’m awake, these days,” he says. “The astral plane — one long nightmare.”

“Not quite the shore leave anyone was going after,” Keith says, commiserating. It’s funny; he loves Shiro — does not, in fact, know how to stop loving Shiro — but he’s out of practice with actually talking to him, even more than he was after Shiro returned from his first round of interstellar imprisonment. Every time Shiro’s disappeared, Keith has kept up a one-sided conversation in his head, and every time Shiro returns, he has trouble remembering what he’s said in person and what he’s imagined saying. 

“All vacations are disappointing,” Shiro agrees. “I guess some things never change.” He nods towards the deck of cards in Keith’s hands. “Need a quiz partner?”

“Not anymore,” Keith says. “I’ve been practicing.”

“That’s good,” Shiro says, looking as though it’s anything but. “You deserve something easy.”

There’s nothing easy about color, Keith thinks. It’s all of it just a trick of the light — a series of tricks. He’d give it up and go back to seeing everything as a series of shadows if it meant that Shiro would stop acting like this is proof of how Keith isn’t quite up to snuff. He still hasn’t forgotten how Shiro was so invested in color practice, like it was the final puzzle piece before Keith could become Shiro’s successor. 

“If I deserve something easy,” Keith chokes out, “I don’t think this’ll make the cut.” 

“C’mon,” Shiro argues. It’s unfair of him to slip back into that role, the one where he’s simultaneously encouraging and chiding. “So you got your colors the old-fashioned way, it’s kind of romantic — ”

“Please don’t,” Keith tells him. “It’s not like that. It can’t be like that. I don’t have a soulmate.”

“Oh, Keith,” Shiro says. He gusts out an exhale strong enough that the fire sparks and flares; the sparks shine green and gold around him, and Keith blinks and blinks and blinks until the little motes they leave behind have faded into the larger glow of the fire. “What makes you say that?”

“Don’t,” Keith repeats. 

“Is this a Galra thing?” Shiro demands. “Did you ask your mom about it? I don’t believe this is something you don’t get to have.”

Keith regrets not waking Hunk for his watch. Shiro’s sitting on the side of the fire that leads back to the lions and the clearing as a whole; Keith could probably get past him and back on Black without too much of a confrontation, but it would be obvious in a way that Shiro would get between his teeth and refuse to drop. “It’s not a Galra thing,” he says instead. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how soul colors are supposed to work, but mine didn’t come all the way in until our fight. It’s been years. I figured I was a glitch.” He wants to curl up into himself and hide. He wants to get behind the controls of Black and take off in flight, even if he has to coax her teleportation to work. It would be worth the headache. 

“You’re not a glitch, Keith,” Shiro sighs. He hefts himself to his feet — his balance is good, his core’s too well-developed for it not to be, but having to adjust to only one arm is still shitty. “Come here.”

Keith will do whatever Shiro asks of him. It’s his great weakness. 

He walks around the firepit; when he’s close enough, Shiro reaches out and reels him in. His hugs used to be a complex arrangement, one that involved clasped hands and an arm over Keith’s shoulders. Keith’s taller now, and Shiro seems to appreciate that he doesn’t have to slouch so deeply to get his arm around him. 

“That’s better,” Shiro says. Keith shuts his eyes — they’re so close that the details of Shiro’s armor is blurred out, and with his back to the fire, everything has the muddy look of a shadow. It’s restful. He forgot that Shiro is a tactile person, that every conversation about how Keith saw the world was punctuated by touch. 

(He didn’t forget. It was easier to review his card deck if he pretended he didn’t want to finish his practice session off with a hug and a series of kind words. Shiro was too generous before he died.)

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Shiro whispers in Keith’s ear. “I had the therapy before I was born. I’ve always seen color.”

“I know — ”

“Shh,” the cutoff is more of a command than a comfort, but that’s Shiro to a tee. “Not like that. Not like it doesn’t matter.” He can’t pull Keith closer; this version of his embrace lacks an additional anchor. Keith presses his face into Shiro’s chest and submits to being soothed. 

It’s nothing like when Shiro used to hold him after color practice. Keith’s head isn’t throbbing, and he’s not distracted by the encroaching anxiety of his body changing without submitting proper notice beforehand. Both of them have lost what little softness they had in the early days of the war, and Shiro’s dismantled bicep presses uncomfortably into Keith’s sternum until he wraps his arms around Shiro in turn. The wolf bumps against their shins, making her little chuffing noises that mean she is pleased or confused; Keith’s still learning all the ways she can talk back. 

“Keith,” Shiro’s voice beneath his ear is the same as it ever was. Keith has never forgotten the way Shiro talked to him in the dark. It almost hurts to have it again; it hurts cleanly, beautifully, the same way it had hurt to hold on to Shiro and let both of them fall. “You know better than anyone that the soul colors don’t come in all at once. Even if you already have them.” 

Shiro tells him this, and the way he says it — it sounds like a confession. 

“Things are brighter when you’re around,” he says, and it sounds almost like  _ things are better with you near. _

“I love you,” Keith reminds him. The words drag themselves out of his throat, and they’re more growl than speech. Shiro makes a little noise of his own at the sound, a gasp or a croon. It is wordless and beautiful. “I don’t know if you’re my soulmate,” Keith says. “But if I had one, I’d want them to be you.”

“I believe you.” Shiro presses the line of his nose against Keith’s forehead. The cartilage, even with the divot from his scar, is hard and cool; funny, to think of even Shiro’s nose as a source of comfort. Keith appreciates it. He’s not sure what he’d do if Shiro kissed him now; this gesture is just as intimate. “And Keith? I don’t know if you’re my soulmate either. I don’t care. Having that — it would be overkill. I know that’s your signature move, but you don’t have to prove anything to me.” 

They’ve been holding each other for long enough now that Keith feels his knees starting to creak. He doesn’t care. In the periphery of this moment, his eyes closed, the darkness heavy and insulating, Keith focuses on the ambient sounds of the fire snapping and the sentient plants stretching their roots into the soil. Shiro is not waiting for an answer, Keith doesn't think — hard to tell, because if Shiro honed one skill on the astral plane, it was his capacity for patience — and Keith is grateful. He has no answers to give. 

Shiro doesn’t tell Keith he loves him. Not that night: not by the fire, with the trembling vines of their vegetable audience creeping close and retreating from the heat of the moment in equal measure. Keith is still climbing out of the well of his grief; he’s been mourning Shiro for so long, in so many ways, that hearing the words might push him back in. Keith tries not to dwell on what’s already come to pass, but he has a sense that if he knew Shiro loved him back, Keith might never recover from years spent reconciling himself to the absence of that regard. A waste: Keith does not want to think of his own heart having been wasted. 

Instead, the embrace ends opposite to how it started: there’s no reluctance as they part, no desperation. Shiro walks back to his bedroll in the shelter of Green — he’d opted to sleep outside, under the stars, because it was both more and less like being trapped in the astral plane. Keith watches the shape of him in the dark, the way Shiro ‘s body blends hulkingly into the nest of his blankets, and the way the wolf deserts Keith in favor of curling up inside the compelling hollow of Shiro’s bent knees. 

Keith’s not jealous at the abandonment. He’s always hated the way the wolf makes herself comfortable sleeping in that space. It makes it almost impossible to shift in his sleep, or turn over if there’s a rock making itself known beneath his hip. He doesn’t know why he worries about disturbing her, since she has never, since puppyhood, shown him the same regard. Shiro is welcome to the conundrum. 

It’s long past Hunk’s watch. That’s fine. Hunk deserves a rest, after his close call earlier in the day. It had taken all of Coran’s haphazard knowledge of botanical divorce law to convince the flora to relinquish their marriage claim on Yellow’s paladin. Becoming rooted in their community — more to a point, being buried alive and allowing the roots of the plant colony to twine and settle in the decomposing flesh and the left-behind lattice of Hunk’s sturdy bones — would not have been conducive to their larger mission of defending the universe. 

Keith wakes Allura instead, and settles down across the clearing so he can fall asleep with all the others clearly in his sight. The glow of it is soothing: a filter laid over every other color that exists, highlighting it and muting it from one moment to the next. Keith is getting used to this way of seeing, but he appreciates having Shiro as his focal point once more.

Shiro, asleep next to the wolf: his white hair mussed, his grey eyes closed, the black-and-white of his armor reflecting back fragments of the firelight. Keith never needed a soulmate to see him. 


End file.
